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In his book Ultimate Guide to Pay-Per-Click
Advertising, internet marketing expert Richard Stokes
helps you master advanced search engine strategies from top
search engine marketers to increase your sales. In this edited
excerpt, the author explains just how important web analytics
are to your online marketing campaigns.

Pretend for a moment that instead of promoting your business over
the web, you were to take a more traditional approach, such as TV
advertising. You might be prepared to spend upwards of a
quarter-million dollars just for production, to be followed by
potentially millions of dollars of national media buys.

With so much at stake, it seems unlikely that you would simply
write a check and forget about it. Not by a long shot. You'd be
watching the sales figures like a hawk to see if your campaign
was bringing customers in. And if it didn't perform, you'd cut
your losses quickly (and probably fire your marketing manager).

Most of our businesses will never grow to the scale where we can
afford big-ticket TV buys. Fortunately, internet advertising now
gives us a way to purchase smaller, more reasonably priced blocks
of traffic.

The downside of this is that these less-expensive campaigns tend
to fall off the radar of most managers and entrepreneurs. There's
a false sense of security that comes from spending "only" $500 a
month or so on search. We tell ourselves, "Maybe it will come in,
maybe it won't," or "Let's just start it and see what happens."

This is nothing more than a shortcut to failure, and you don't
want to fall into that trap. So please, take this firm, but
friendly, piece of advice:

If you blow off the numbers behind your business, your marketing
will be mediocre because it will be built on opinion and
guesswork.

Guesses and opinions are the enemy of good marketing. If you let
the numbers tell you the truth, you'll make your website better.
You'll make your advertising better. And your sales will end up
five, 10, even 100 times more than where you started.

Marketing Sherpa reports that 90 percent of search marketers use
some form of analytics. While this figure is probably optimistic
(the majority of advertisers I talk to have no website tracking
in place or never look at their reports), the fact remains that
your serious competitors (the top one percent) will certainly be
relying on some form of website tracking to improve their
returns. You need to do the same if you want to level the playing
field.

You must have tracking installed on your website. There are no
ifs, ands or buts about it.

Website analytics is the study of online
user behavior for the purpose of improving sales. By adding
analytics capabilities to your website, you'll be able to
measure:

How much and how often they convert (for example, buy your
products, sign up for your email newsletters, request more
information from you, etc.)

How long they stay on each page

How quickly they leave every page and your website in general

How much every page on your site is worth to you

With this information, you can make your site better. You'll have
the insights you need to improve your site design, create a
better user experience and streamline your conversion pages.
Sales, leads, signups, donations--whatever it is you're trying to
get your visitors to do on your website--is what we mean when
we're discussing "conversions."

The end result? You'll get a higher return on every advertising
dollar you spend.

These insights will all be contained in your website analytics
reports, your new best friends.